Free Live Free

needed. All I had to do was make a fair-sized deposit back in forty-two that nobody but Kip or I could touch. What’s more, I could assure the cooperation of the FBI and the OSS, or any successor organizations, just by leaving messages saying that anyone who used certain code phrases was to get it.”

Candy opened her eyes. “That was how you got my john bumped off his flight. I’ve been wondering about that.”

“Right. Only we couldn’t tell the FBI or the CIA—those were the new people—about the gizmo, so we couldn’t tell them where we came from. But we needed them because it didn’t take long to see that this time we weren’t the only show in town. I’d already begun to suspect the men in High Country were using the gizmo themselves, and that a lot of them were going to periods they couldn’t return from, periods in which High Country did not exist. At first I thought it was one of them.”

Stubb asked, “When did you know it was you?”

For almost half a minute, Free stared out at the night. The snow clouds were breaking up, and the dark, tossing water of the Atlantic showed through the breaks. “There wasn’t any exact time I can put my finger on,” he said at last. “I felt the urge; we all did. We knew the Allies would win—it was in all the history books—so perhaps the call of duty wasn’t as strong as it should have been. And I saw the future we’d built.” He paused again.

“Do you know what I wanted? The old frontier. To see what this country was like before they chopped down all the trees and paved it over. The wanting got so strong sometimes I knew I’d do it sooner or later, and the more we got on the man who called himself Free, the clearer it was that he looked like me. My full name’s Samuel Benjamin Whitten, by the way. Buck’s just a nickname.”

“You’re Buck,” Barnes said. “You owned the Flying Carpet.”

Free nodded. “We needed someplace where we could meet people without leading anybody to the old military compound at the airport, which was where we kept our files and some sensitive equipment, like the portable gizmo. I bought the Flying Carpet and staffed it with people I felt I could trust to look the other way whenever something a little odd happened.”

Barnes said, “May I ask a question, sir? When I was in the Flying Carpet, I met a musician called Binko. Was he one of the people you brought out of the past?”

Free shook his head.

Stubb said, “Ozzie mentioned him when he was telling Madame S. and me what happened to him. I asked him about the music. That seemed to be another clue.”

“I suppose it was,” Free admitted. “I knew I’d be hearing a lot of whatever band I hired, so I hired a band I liked.”

Candy opened her eyes again. “You still haven’t got to the payoff. Are you ever?”

The witch darted a glance at her. “What do you mean? Do not question the Master!”

“Really. Listen, he didn’t bring us up here so he could tell you about Hitler or talk about matches with Jim or music with Ozzie. So why did he? And why did he have the people down below—that’s him too, don’t forget—do stuff to us? When we were in the little plane, Jim told me they tried to give all of us more than we could handle, and I was the only one who could handle it. Why do that and send us up here?”

Free said, “I wanted to answer your questions first, Miss Garth. I felt I owed you that. Now your questions have come around to the matter I wanted to talk with you about, and I admit I’m glad they have.”

He paused. “Do you remember what I told you about going back to nineteen forty-two to be debriefed? I had gone ten years forward and gathered what information I could about nuclear fission, then returned.”

All four nodded.

“The gizmo—the men who actually developed it called it a space-time singularity induction coil, so you can see why I say gizmo—couldn’t be controlled with pinpoint accuracy then. I had left for fifty-two on August eighteenth, nineteen forty-two. I returned May thirtieth.”

Candy sat up straight, her china-blue eyes wide open. “Holy God! There were two of you?”

Free shook his head. “No, though I didn’t realize that at first. I was debriefed by the people on High Country before I was sent down, of course. They told me when the debriefing was over.” Free paused again. “They also told—ordered me, in fact—not to tell anyone on the ground.

“I wasn’t taken to Washington for further debriefing, as I had expected, but flown down to Langley Field and released. I spent a day there wondering whether I dared phone Buffalo.”

Candy asked, “And did you?”

“Yes. I called our plant and asked to speak to the president of the company, after swearing to myself that if I answered, I would hang up. Kip came on the line and asked in her most business-like manner what I wanted. I said something along the lines of ‘Are you in charge, Miss?’ She recognized my voice and said—these were her exact words, I’ll never forget them—‘It’s you, Daddy! We were all so worried.’”

“My God,” Candy said softly.

“I questioned her and learned that I had gone into my office about an hour before the time our shuttle plane must have appeared in the sky of forty-two. No one had seen me since. I told Kip where I was and said that I had been called away on urgent Government business, that I would be back soon, but that I would be going to work in Government full time within a month or so.”

“So you went to work for this Donovan when he asked you.” Stubb made a circular motion with one hand. “It seems to me that when you went to fifty-two again and came back, you’d get stuck in a loop.”

“That’s what we thought,” Free said. “So I didn’t go. There was no point in it, after all; the people in High Country already had everything I’d learned about the bomb. When August eighteenth rolled around, the shuttle plane flew me down again for debriefing by Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Donovan. I told them I had just returned, and in a sense it was true.”

“Kip never suspected?”